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If the time of year and the time of night were propitious, buried treasure awaited diligent searchers—here, interpreters Richard Davis, left, and Nat Lasley, with a dowsing rod—a conviction shared by hundreds if not thousands of colonial treasure hunters.

The recipe for riches required the sprinkling of magic potions, incantation of the appropriate spells, and then a period of silence to keep the genies of treasure from sinking it deeper into the earth. Yet, despite persistent attempts, magic never led to moolah.

Library of Congress

Benjamin Franklin, a man of reason, scorned superstition.

The battle between reason and superstition swirled in print.

Scorpio was but one of the Zodiac signs parsed by the astrologers colonists consulted in the eighteenth century.

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Devotees of the occult indulged in reading tea leaves or, in the print above, coffee grounds to determine fate and fortune.

Mumbo Jumbo Meets its Match

by Andrew G. Gardner

Benjamin Franklin and a friend ventured out
on a summer 1729 afternoon stroll from Philadelphia.
Half a mile from town, they came on an
array of large pits in the ground, recently dug. The
holes were the workings of the treasure seekers—
ordinary folks caught up in a fantastical obsession
that persisted more than a century. They believed
the countryside abounded in buried treasure chests
waiting to be discovered.

The idea was a blend of folklore, hocus-pocus,
and wishful thinking. In New Hampshire the treasure
had belonged to Captain Kidd the pirate and
could be found even miles from any seacoast. Of
course it never was. In Ohio, 1,000 miles from the
ocean, Spanish and Indian gold was the lure. In Pittston, Maine, pits were dug eighty feet deep, and
in Vermont a pockmarked landscape showed “where
generation upon generation of money diggers have
worked their superstitious energies.” Some used talismanic
seer stones to find the underground money
caches; others divining rods and such like.

The whole nonsensical enterprise must rank as
one of the greatest examples of a gullible population
deluded en masse. Had Franklin, an exceptional
natural philosopher and one of America’s foremost
scientific minds, returned to the diggings after dark,
he might have remarked the insanity of a search
shrouded in magic, ritual, and superstition. The best
time to dig, according to the diggers, was between
midnight and dawn. Summer was the best season
because the heat from the sun caused the treasure
to rise nearer the surface. With a silver spoon, they
spread magic potions around the search site to expel
evil spirits and recited ritual incantations from
astrological texts. Thereafter, the rule of silence
prevailed. Any talking would cause the treasure to
bury itself further into the ground or set the spirits
guarding the loot to get angry, with who-knew-what
consequences. How could rational men and women
believe in such fantasies?

Echoes of such notions, however, persist in a popular
culture that pays to see Hollywood’s cave-raiding
archaeologists and big-time scientists caught up
in Holy Grail murder mysteries. Franklin, founder of
the American Philosophical Society and one of early America’s greatest enlightened
minds, has his
name taken in vain by a
fictional character in the
2004 film National Treasure.
Played by Nicholas
Cage, Benjamin Franklin
Gates, a sixth generation
seeker, looks for treasure
of the founding fathers.

Trying to make sense
of the twists and
turns of some of our
ancestors’ antics has never
been easy, and when it
comes to interpreting how
colonists of centuries ago
saw the world, it is more
so. What we can divine is
a pattern where superstition,
astrology, and the occult
ruled the early American
roost without apology.
The extent to which the
colonists’ lives were influenced
by what we consider
irrational and just plain
silly is staggering—witness
the treasure seekers.
But it went further: their
lives were informed by
a firm belief in evil forces that stalked them daily.
The devil, witches, and magic were, in some colonists’
minds, real and terrifying. Poor hunting or fishing
could be put down to a magic spell cast by a malicious
neighbor. Prodigies—anything strange and out of the
ordinary in the natural world, from earthquakes, meteorites,
and thunderbolts to oddly shaped root vegetables—
would have people quaking with the expectation
that the day of judgment was nigh. Charms
and amulets were credited with keeping the devil
at bay. Horseshoes nailed to our twenty-first-century
suburban doors are a hangover from those days.
Witchcraft—including sticking pins in dolls that resembled
the intended victims—was blamed for the
sickness and death of loved ones and livestock. It was
not something to be meddled with.

Today, many still give a cursory nod to newspaper
horoscopes, but to most their wisdom and
insight are short of earthshattering.
We still might
remember to turn the
change over in our pockets
at the sight of the new
moon, a still-to-be-proven
attempt to bump up our
chances in the lottery. But
if disease strikes us, it is
doubtful we would rely
on the musings and advice
of an astrologer to
specify the best dates to
be bled, or which herbs
would benefit which organs,
bearing in mind the
planetary influences of
Venus, Neptune, or Mercury,
or the added complication
of whether the
moon was in Aquarius,
Pisces, or Gemini.

What changed the
world forever began
to appear in
the Americas about the
mid-seventeenth century.
Western Europe’s philosophers
and scientists
tended the roots of the
Enlightenment before it
crossed the Atlantic, where, in time, such men as
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson seized on
it. The philosophers and early scientists set in motion
an upheaval that carried society from an era of
“cunning men” and “wise women,” whose superstitious
mumbo jumbo had held sway for centuries, into
the Age of Reason. Human reason, it was seen, could
defeat ignorance, ritual, and superstition. A trust
in emerging sciences solved problems that plagued
humankind and helped establish a degree of control
over the natural world. But it was not all plain sailing.

The church that had held sway over the lives
of men for so long was not always sympathetic to a
view of the world based on observation, experimentation,
and logic, as opposed to faith. With a pedigree
of fighting Satan and the powers of darkness, as well
as a monopoly on delivering salvation, the church
saw itself as the only
true religion, and was
not about to meekly concede
its position. Galileo’s
epic and losing battle in
1630 against the Church
of Rome began when he
challenged its ancient
dogma with science to
demonstrate that the sun,
not the earth, was the
center of the planetary
system. It was an early
example of the struggles
that lay ahead.

“In all Superstition”
wrote Sir Francis Bacon
in 1632, “Wise Men follow
Fooles.” One such wise
early American was Cotton
Mather, a politically
influential New England
Puritan minister who is
best remembered for his
role in the Salem witch
trials of 1692. But Mather
is an example of someone
who later in life began
to consider the Enlightenment
seriously, and to
look objectively at what
made the natural world
tick. In his earlier years, Mather’s world revolved
around all things spiritual.

He concluded that the devil’s influence was
everywhere. He became a rabid witch-hunter. He
pushed for spectral evidence—evidence from ghosts
or demons—to be admitted during the Salem trials,
where he dismissed one of the accused as “a rampant
hag.” As for the result—the last witch execution in
the English-speaking world—Mather concluded, “For
Justice being so far executed among us, I shall Rejoyce
that God is Glorified.”

But the other, intriguing side to Mather’s character
tended to the fledgling sciences that were
beginning to raise a new generation’s interest. He
experimented with the breeding of corn, attempting
to document what would today fall in the realm of
genetics. And during a 1721 smallpox outbreak in
Boston, he took a courageous stand, encouraging inoculation to prevent the
disease. Despite a public
outcry that the procedure
was tantamount to murder,
Mather persuaded a
doctor to try it on the
doctor’s only son and two
slaves. All survived.

Mather’s acceptance
of this new scientific reality,
unpolluted by a
historical marinade of
superstition, cannot have
been easy, and highlights
the sea change in thinking
that seeped into the
minds of the ignorant.
In his earlier years, if
challenged on his belief
in prodigies, Mather resorted
to name-calling;
skeptics were dismissed
as “not being gentlemen.”
But as history professor
Michael Winship writes,
“Mather’s belief in prodigies
was hardly idiosyncratic.
People of all social
ranks had long taken for
granted prognostications
of future events. Prodigies
were part of a larger
world of wonders, of omens . . . of magic and supernatural
interventions.” Even though, for a man of
the cloth who regularly spent his evenings peering
at misshapen vegetables, attempting to divine the
future, grasping the new science that clearly was at
odds with his old, comfortable, yet strange and fanciful,
ideas must have been some leap of faith.

Yet Mather’s generation was the first to have to
ask whether its world and its long-held beliefs were
right. In 1719, the northern lights unexpectedly lit
up New England’s night skies. Some were fearful for
their future. A Harvard associate of Mather’s said,
“No man should fright himself by supposing that
dreadful things will follow, such as Famine, Sword or
Sickness.” But Mather was not quite convinced, and
pursued his investigation of the aurora borealis with
a suggestion that it was not unreasonable to suppose
that angels were responsible. Yet, by 1726, two years before his death, Mather
was in print telling people
to ignore “Superstitious
Fancies about eclipses or
comets.” Perhaps he had
come full circle.

The history of divination,
or fortune telling,
stretches into antiquity.
Roman priests—the
augurs—dissected dead
animals and studied the arrangement
of the internal
organs to foretell events.
Through the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries,
astrology was the divination
of choice for the American
colonist. Astrological
almanacs circulated widely
in the colonies, the bestsellers
of the age.

As conceived, astrology
was a serious business, and
as near rational as anything
in the ancient world. Celestial machinations
ran like clockwork, were readily observable, and
could be measured and recorded. That led the ancients
to attempt to correlate day-to-day happenings
on our planet to what was happening in the heavens.
But by the time the colonists arrived in America,
astrology, despite an interest shown by such astronomers
as Isaac Newton, had a surfeit of mumbo
jumbo, which, counter-intuitively, made it popular.
Astrology presented a perfect tool for melding that
art with sorcery and witchcraft into a sort of cure-all,
alternative pagan religion that found an audience,
particularly among rural colonists.

Throughout the colonies, occult religion was
common. Private library lists from the era confirm
the ownership of occult texts, often among
ministers. Thomas Teakle of Accomack County,
Virginia, was an Anglican priest around the end
of the seventeenth century who had a collection of
reading material that would not look out of place in
a twenty-first-century New Age bookshop. Among
scores of titles in his library, Teakle could open Medicina
Practica: or Practical Physick to mug up on
astrologically generated potions or alchemical recipes
for turning lead into
gold. Or he could consult
a 1670 tome of bestselling
magic by Marin de la
Chambre titled The Art
How to Know Men, which
dealt with horoscopes as
well as chiromancy and
metoposcopy, the art of
foretelling the future from
the wrinkles on a subject’s
forehead.

Occultists hung out
shingles proclaiming their
ability to find lost objects,
and advising on best dates
for setting out on a journey,
starting a business, getting
married, or getting pregnant.
The same sorts of
questions that people ask
today’s fortune-tellers. But
in colonial times, health
was the issue that took
most people on a visit to
the astrologer. An individual’s
horoscope, it was claimed, gave insights into
how someone related to the greater powers of the
universe. Today we look on this as a bit of fun, but
back then, when average life expectancy was less
than forty and the practice of medicine was not
advanced, the cunning men and wise women had
clients knocking down their doors.

As the seventeenth century became the eighteenth,
ten out of twelve children died before their
second birthday. That stark statistic from the time
of the Enlightenment suggests why colonists placed
their faith so completely in the gods and, for insurance,
the charlatans who offered occult alternatives
to prayer.

Medical science had been climbing up the learning
curve throughout the 1600s, but spreading the
new knowledge was slow. Physicians prescribed such
compounds as ground-up Egyptian mummy powder,
milled unicorn horn, and castoreum—one ingredient
of which was a vile-smelling root popularly called
devil’s dung—to be taken while reciting charms. For
epilepsy, pulverized mistletoe was recommended, “as
much as can be held on a sixpence coin, early in the
morning, in black cherry juice, during several days
around the full moon.” In 1634, a reputable English
doctor prescribed for Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts
a concoction of “live toads baked to black
crisp.”

When sickness struck, as it so often did in colonial
times, with a vengeance, there sometimes seemed little
to choose between the certified doctor and a humbug.
Cotton Mather at least seemed to realize that
the state of doctoring drove colonists into the realm
of the charlatans, who had “no natural efficacy for the
cure of diseases.” In Mather’s book, the charlatans’
remedies were the cures of the devil. In time the advance
of medical sciences—anatomy, physiology, and
pathology, to name but three—would win out over the
mumbo jumbo, or the devil, depending on your point
of view, not entirely but enough to persuade the average
citizen to think twice about whom to consult.

The Enlightenment began the trend that ushered
in the Age of Reason, exposing human ignorance
and superstition for what they were.
It never succeeded, however, in banishing the
darkness completely. Treasure seekers roamed
through part of the nineteenth century, ever hopeful,
but seldom rewarded. Today fortune-tellers
of every shade ply their trade, convinced of their
objectivity. Horoscopes market mumbo jumbo for
the masses. Goes to show how timeless William
Shakespeare’s observations were. “Lord,” he wrote
in Midsummer Night’s Dream, “What fools these
mortals be.”

Andrew Gardner, who writes on Canada’s Salt
Spring Island, contributed to the spring 2010 journal
the article “The Indian War.”